2.1 What is Discoverer Plus Relational?

Discoverer Plus Relational is the Discoverer component that enables you to create and analyze worksheets. Using Discoverer Plus Relational, you can access and analyze data from your company's database, without having to understand complex database concepts. Using wizards and menus, Discoverer Plus Relational guides you through the steps to retrieve and analyze data that supports your business decisions.

Other Discoverer users can open the worksheets you share with them, using Discoverer Plus Relational, Discoverer Viewer, Discoverer portals, Discoverer Desktop, and Discoverer Web Services.

2.2 What is a relational data source?

A relational data source is a database in which information is stored in several database tables. Each database table comprises several columns, and one or more rows. The different tables in a database can be related. Having data in separate but related tables is an efficient way to store and retrieve information.

Relational databases are a widely used data source. However, relational databases can become complicated when they contain hundreds of related tables, with thousands of columns, and millions of rows. Finding information in such a database can be a real challenge.

The Discoverer manager uses the Discoverer End User Layer to hide the complexity of the database from you. By defining business areas, folders, and items, the Discoverer manager enables you to use Discoverer Plus Relational to find just the data you want to analyze.

2.3 What are business areas?

A business area is a collection of related information in the database.

The Discoverer manager works with the different departments in your organization to identify the information that each department requires from the database. The Discoverer manager locates the information in the database and groups it into business areas. Within each business area, the Discoverer manager organizes information into folders.

For example, the key areas of a company's business might be sales, production, and human resources. So the Discoverer manager might create three corresponding business areas.

a Sales folder containing information about the sales of each product (for example, the store where a particular product was sold, the price for which the product was sold, the cost of the product, the profit made on each sale, and the product reference number)

By querying the Sales folder, you can see information about a particular sales transaction. But to see the description of the product that was sold (rather than simply the product reference number) you must also query the Products folder.

The Discoverer manager might combine information from several folders into one folder to make it easy to find all the information you need. For example, the Discoverer manager might create a third folder called Product Sales Info, containing the description of each product sold (from the Products folder) and the price that was paid for it (from the Sales folder).

Figure 2-6 A Discoverer folder containing information from a Products folder and a Sales folder

2.5 What are items?

If you are familiar with relational databases, an item is similar to a column in a database table. Indeed, an item might be based on a column in a database table.

For example, each product your company produces might have a reference number, a description, and a brand. The Products folder containing information about these products would have three items (a Product Reference Number item, a Description item, and a Brand item).

Key to figure:a. The Tabular Layout worksheet, showing profit figures for departments across regions for 2000.b. The Crosstab Layout worksheet, showing a comparison of profit figures for each department in quarter one (Q1) and quarter two (Q2) across regions for 2000.

2.7 What are the new features in Discoverer Plus 11.1.1?

Discoverer Plus has been enhanced with Oracle BI Discoverer Web Services, which is an Application Programming Interface (API) that enables a client to obtain Discoverer connections, workbooks, and worksheets; to execute worksheet queries; and to return worksheet content using the SOAP protocol (version 1.1 with RPC/Encoded messaging format). This API enables you to use Discoverer Plus features programmatically and through the user interface.